A True Alternative Worldview

For hundreds of years, Christians have fought for their cause, by using the tools of reason and logic, to reclaim a mainstream following and dominate the academic debate, but this is not the approach of Christ's ministry. We need to re-examine the role Christianity should play in the world. Instead of focusing on getting political leaders, to champion our causes, fighting to be the establishment, and holding to the ideals of an imagined perfect past, we should accept the role of the outcast and the victim.

 

Throughout most of Christian history, we have not been the establishment, but rather a counter-culture movement. The Bible does not represent itself as the champion of the rich and the powerful, but as an Asian mystery religion, of passionate mystics, in opposition to religious scholars. Christianity is the underdog and the alternative to the way society is evolving.

 

Instead of clinging to our grandparent's generation, we need to go far in the past and embrace the future at the same time. We need to see the battle for Christianity and the problems in the world today as essentially spiritual. We need to take back the ecological movement from unbelievers and abandon the wealth and power, that believers have given up their first love for.

 

We need to re-imagine the lines of contention, giving up our worldly status and human support, for a model focused more on who Christ was, rather than what theology and religious traditions we were taught in schools. We need to embrace reality and the way the world is and take our stand, on the most essential battle. Christianity needs to return, to champion the cause of the rejected and the persecuted and stop using wealth and power, to destroy those who deny our theology, but embrace the life of Christ.

 

Christians should be on the right side of history. There is a clear right and wrong. There are clear positions to take. But we have collectively chosen the wrong path. We need to stop trying to explain ourselves to unbelievers and choose instead to win them, by our actions. Yes, I embrace an evangelical Christianity, not in terms of traditional theology, but in terms of objective.

 

The problem with Christianity today is not that we embrace the mainstream worldview, but that we reject the wrong things about it. We need to start doing what we know is right and stop arguing about theology and explanations, for things that we cannot comprehend. Essentially we need to live a life of faith, in rejection to a secular life, which is based on the authority of reason.

 

The authority we need to answer to is Christ and He too is Who we should emulate. Simply, we need to be like the disciples of Christ, instead of being like those religious scholars, who rejected Him. If most people see Christians as the contemporary Pharisees, we need to learn from this and follow the spirit of the law and not just in outward displays of moral superiority.

"When the mood comes, I order a carriage; when I feel tired, I rest. A thousand thanks to heaven and earth for freeing me for such leisure. I feel sorry for the white-haired official who works the station; he's cast an entire life between the hooves of a horse."

 

--Yi Kyubo in "Written Under the Upper Story of Yosong Posthouse"

 

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."

 

--Ecclesiastes 9:10